A Baseball Heretic Looks God In The Eye

May 07, 1992|By Kenneth R. Clark.

All my life I have harbored the dark secret, tucked away in a deceitful dichotomy of mingled shame and defiance. Now, in a shocking parallel to the act of walking about in the 1950s saying, ``Hi, I`m Ken Clark and I`m a Communist,`` it`s out.

All my life I hated baseball.

Judge me as you will, but before you cry, ``To the stake with this heretic!`` hear the rest of this, my mea culpa. Like serial killers, kleptomaniacs and politicians everywhere, I blame it on my childhood.

But for an editor at the Tribune, I would have carried the secret to my grave. He is both my betrayer and my confessor and I thank him because now it`s over.

It all began when I, with my colleagues in the Tribune`s New York bureau, was summoned to Chicago for an editorial conference. As a special treat, we would be going to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field.

We would sit high in the skybox and watch the mighty Cubs slay an evil team called ``The Fillies.`` I don`t know why they`re called The Fillies. I suspect it has something to do with horse racing.

I approached the event with trepidation. Seized, perhaps, by anxiety over the impending unknown, I did the unthinkable. I confided to my editor that this would be my very first major-league baseball game. Surely, I thought, he won`t tell on me, but he did and the word spread like wildfire.

The antipathy-the seed of my shame-was planted a long time ago when, under the combined auspices of Little League and peer pressure, I joined the Ft. Collins Black`s Glass & Cycle Cobras.

Oh, we were a proud lot then. We got T-shirts and red and white baseball caps and learned to spit and everything. They put me in center field because, as I was to realize years later, nobody in our league could hit the ball that far, thus reducing the damage I could do to the cause.

My best friend, a towering youth who would hit 6 foot 6 by the time he entered 9th grade, inexplicably wanted to be the catcher. He was given the job, I think, because he made an excellent backstop.

In our first game, the pitcher wound up and sent the ball blazing toward the plate. My friend missed it with his glove but caught it with his jockstrap. With his face suddenly the color of putty and his eyes rolled heavenward, he collapsed in a quivering heap of agony across home plate.

``Balllll one!`` bellowed the umpire.

The significance of the call was not lost upon me. Then and there I decided to seek other, less traumatic endeavors.

Over the years, the un-American cancer of baseball-phobia deepened and spread.

Only once, when we were ``getting to know`` our daughter`s fiance, did I nearly blow my cover. He was a Brooklyn-born New Yorker with an accent so thick I thought at first he was speaking Arabic.

One day, as all of us were driving somewhere in Flushing and passed Shea Stadium, he raised his arms and said, ``Behold, my kuh-TEE-druhl.``

``Behold your what?`` I said.

``My kuh-TEE-druhl,`` he repeated, ``where I woiship d`Mets.``

Years have passed since then. But now, in Chicago, at age 60, I`d let the truth out. I was going to my first major-league baseball game at Wrigley Field and everybody was going to be there to see.

Well, it was wonderful. I spent a long April day, shielded in the skybox from a cutting wind, eating weenies, drinking beer, rooting for the Cubs and watching with fascination as the occasional foul ball beaned a fan and sent his comrades swarming like fire ants for the coveted trophy.

I actually hated to see the game end, and when it did, I left exhilarated, deeply satisfied and at peace, purged, at last, of my heresy.

Wrigley Field, Shea Stadium: Maybe they are ``kuh-TEE-druhls`` of a sort after all. Heaven knows when the home team is down one run in the bottom of the ninth with two on base and two out, there is no shortage of prayer. And when the batter in that situation sends a high fly ball singing into the left- field bleachers, something akin to a Hallelujah Chorus erupts.

There are even daily communicants who never miss a home game. They leave sweeter, more compassionate souls, which is what religion really is all about. Good Lord, could it be true?